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There has been much talk in the last couple of years of building a 300 ship navy. Truly a Navy that size would be a great asset to the nation and to the world. Not only would it help project American influence all over the globe but would insure freedom of navigation for the world’s maritime commerce. After all, 70% of the globe is covered by water, 80% of the world’s commerce is moved on water and 90% of the world’s population lives within 200 miles of the sea. A strong Navy makes sense.

The sad fact is that a truly capable fleet is at the very least ten years out if we as a nation decide to take the steps necessary to make the vision a reality. That is a mighty big IF. I don’t see a whole lot of realistic discussion of the issues, much less a growing public awareness of what the challenges are and demand for resolution. Without that commitment to rebuilding the foundations of a strong Navy any shipbuilding program will be too little too late and billions of dollars – and hundreds if not thousands of lives – wasted.

What are the challenges? I list these in order of importance as I see it.

At the height of the Cold War we had fourteen naval shipyards, today we have four. Some of those are over 90 years old and desperately need upgrading to manage the needs of our modern fleet. Ships are beasts for maintenance and must spend a considerable amount of time in shipyards just to keep them running. As things stand our ships and aircraft are poorly maintained and are a danger to the sailors who man them. It is a national crime to ask them to go in harms way with gravely deteriorated hulls, propulsion, sensors, navigation, weapons and airframes. Our naval shipyards simply can’t cope with the fleet we have, we need more shipyards. Civilian shipyards cannot be realistically tasked to maintain naval vessels, the nature of the equipment is just too different. We need to at least double our naval maintenance capabilities, and that will take time and lots, and I do mean LOTS, of money.

Poor leadership, inadequate training, crews run to exhaustion by operational tempo, faulty equipment, it is simply dreadful. Some that results from lack of maintenance, but the worst is the scandalous dereliction of senior and mid level leadership. The officer corps needs serious attention, as does crew training and discipline. These two ships are front line units and it can be safely inferred that the rot pervades the entire organization. This needs to be cleaned up before we can hope to man more ships with competent crews.

Two kinds of LCS

Zumwalt class destroyer

We need a new frigate class somewhere between the Littoral Combat Ship and the Arsenal Ship. Ship designs have tended to be expanded so that too much is packed in to make it more capable

Arleigh Burke class destroyer

until it becomes a sort of bloated floating Swiss Army

Ticonderoga class cruiser

knife that ultimately can’t perform any of its intended missions adequately. The above two ship types are prime examples of exactly that. The Arleigh Burke class destroyers and Ticonderoga class cruisers are getting long in the tooth and we don’t have an adequate replacement yet and won’t for years.

Meanwhile China has been busy. Their very efficient espionage service has long since penetrated our attempts at counter intelligence so that it can be reasonably expected that they know the details of every ship, aircraft, propulsion machinery, sensor platform and weapon system we’ve built or intended to build for the last 25 years. They have been building an increasingly effective navy with a good mix of new designs. They have been taking steps to secure their claim to everything from the Korean Peninsula to the Straits of Malacca as their national territorial waters including Taiwan. It is clear as they have watched our capabilities decline they have felt their star in the ascendant. And they are preparing for war.

It has been almost 25 years (how is this POSSIBLE??? Seems like yesterday!) since a colleague at a company I was working at remarked on the topic of surveillance in the internet age, “Its not the government you have to worry about, though they are bad enough, its corporations.” He was a high level tech guy who’d switched careers and worked his way up from the bottom, and very knowledgeable about a lot of things. Back then I thought in terms of secretly ferreting out consumer buying patterns to manipulate us through targeted marketing, which has indeed happened.

But its worse than that. As Republicans in a Republican Club we tend to think in political terms, of political campaigns, voting and elections. Many conservatives, not just Republicans, have argued that we ought to stay away from social issues. I have argued for some time that the problems we face are broader than Republican against Democrat fights. That, as Andrew Breitbart famously said, “Politics is downstream from culture,” and we’ve lost the culture. To win electoral battles we must fight – and win – cultural battles. The Culture Wars matter; on battlefield we have strong – winning – arguments to make that can and should be vehicles for electoral victories.

Trump proved that.

It should be of interest that the Dark Temple of Infernal Progressivism is not working just to silence political discussion and debate, they are working to silence anything that contradicts politically correct dogma, no matter how small, silly, counter factual or freshly defined. The bleeding edge of PC dogma, let it be noted, is about redefining culture, not about political parties and their platforms.It is about fundamentally transforming America. I’m not a fan of fundamentally transforming America, just so you know.

Mark Twain famously said that a newspaper was an instrument for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier. Things haven’t changed much since then, and in fact, seem to have gotten worse since the news moved to the airwaves. I know y’all are right here with me, and this is certainly an exception to the rule, but the internet hasn’t helped. No, really! Fake news is nothing new. Propaganda has been around since the serpent first showed up in the Garden.

What hasn’t helped most of all is that virtually all of the major social sites have been co-opted by Dark Temple Acolytes (AKA TRANZIES: transnational progressives). Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google etc. are all dedicated to proselytizing the Dogma of Degeneracy, Death and Destruction among the unwary. And, by the bye, silencing any voices not singing along with their Chaos Choir.

[Cue Rod Serling opening a Twilight Zone episode:] “In the world of the blind is the one eyed man king? Consider the case of one James Demore, a mild mannered computer programmer working for Google. Mr. Demore suggested that perhaps if Google recognized the innate differences of women in an overwhelmingly male environment, and capitalized on them, the company might be improved thereby, and that would help drive profits. What happens when a simple truth is simply told in a Tranzie infiltrated world is tonight’s tale from the Twilight Zone.”

The Donks have a plan to send more clowns to Congress, and while they are at it, hijack the Electoral College. Now their whole open borders push makes more sense.

I received this from a person who is active in politics and is a reputable source of info.

The MAJORITY of Americans don’t realize just how much POWER & MONEY the Democrats make off Illegal Aliens being in our country even without voter fraud.

This is why they created ‘Sanctuary’ cities and states. Simply by including their numbers as part of the population in the US Census, they get MOUNTAINS of money from the federal government and for every 770,000 illegal aliens in their Democrat-controlled area, they get a seat in the US House of Representatives apportioned to their area following the census.

h/t American Digest

YES! READ IT AGAIN!

After the US Census (performed once every 10 years), the 435 seats in the US House of Representatives are divided up by state populations and the last one resulted in one seat for roughly every 770,000 people.

So, let’s say California has about 4 MILLION non-citizens living there right now. That means that FIVE of their seats in the US Congress are due to people who are not Americans being counted in the Census!

NOW, imagine if by 2020, when they do the next census, they had 10 MILLION non-citizens living in California. That would mean California would get an additional 10 SEATS in the US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES due to non-citizens.

NOW, do you see why Democrats want Open Borders? Next time you hear the Democratic Party Leadership claiming how they ‘care’ about these poor illegal aliens here, call it B.S.!

The Democrats found a way to get money and seats in Congress without even having to rig elections!

IT’S ALL ABOUT MONEY & POWER! You won’t hear about this on the news, but it is the truth.

I guess replacing the electorate and diluting American culture just wan’t enough for these evil control freaks.

Now I see why the Despicables want to shut down Tucker Carlson. He tells us things we don’t want to hear. I say “us” because he’s not only addressing the Left’s pathology, he’s addressing ours as well.

“I ain’t got no pathology,” I hear you cry. To which I reply, ‘couse you do, Honeychild, you’re just comfortable with it, as I am with mine, as the Leftards are with theirs. Nobody’ perfect, not even me, and I set a pretty high bar; in my own mind, at least.

So here’s Tucker, laying out the bloody, dark secret in all it’s ugliness. What to do about it? Ah! That’s for later.

President Trump gave a brief speech regarding the crisis at the border tonight. You can watch it here. He stopped short of declaring a national emergency and invoking the legitimate Constitutional powers that such a move would grant him. Instead he has asked us to call Congress and put a bug in our representatives’ ears.

I will not belabor what he said, the speech is short and you can watch it at the link above. I will say that in calling on us, We the People, he has done absolutely the right thing. This is our national problem, and it we, the citizens of this nation, blessed as we are with a republican form of government, to exercise our civic authority and tell our representatives what it is we expect them to do on our behalf at our direction.

Call your Congressman. Call your Senator.

Yes, I am aware that they are radical left wing Democrats whose interests don’t align with ours. Yes, I am aware that they regard us as their personal tax farms. Yes I realize that regard us as mindless children who must be shown the more enlightened way and made to eat our vegetables whether we want to or not. I know all this, and so do you.

Nevertheless, Call your Congressman. Call your Senator.

Exercise your civic authority as free men and women, or confess your fitness to live only in chains.

The circus has indeed come to town, and promises that over the course of the next two years it will entertain us wonderfully with even more dare-that-devil-Trump trapeze acts, progressive clown routines and depraved social justice animal tricks. The ultimate Donk and RINO show! New, bigger, better, louder, flashier, more and never ending insanity! The reviews will be predictably spectacular and their accomplishments will be nil because they will be up against a double wall: a Republican controlled Senate and Donald J. Trump. Ho-hum.

I have more hope for the Senate ever since Lindsay Graham woke up and decided to actually walk his Republican talk. It seems that the beneficial effects of participation in the Kavanagh hearings haven’t worn off yet. Why, just the other day he interrupted some Fake News Babe to tell her that what she was saying was not only not true, but a lie. Way to go, Lindsay! Maybe it won’t be so much “my friends” as “those fiends” across the aisle. Welcome to the team, Lindsay, nice of you to finally join us.

Then there’s the ultimate back stop, POTUS. Now we get to see how well Trump plays defense. Which is not to say that he hasn’t been, given that Paul Lyin’ Ryan was undermining the charge he should have been leading to get the President’s agenda enacted in the House. But now with the House in Commicrat hands I expect the gloves to come off, if indeed they were ever on. Put on your asbestos overcoats, boys and girls, and keep your extinguishers handy, sparks are going to fly.

Meanwhile back at the ranch Antsy Nancy Pelosi has taken the gavel in hand and is ready to hammer out some Social Justice. She and her pirate crew are promising a never ending Progressive Pride Parade and Impeachment Pie Fight. They’ll let it all hang out where America will see it. And America WILL see it, Pravda on the Potomac, the New York Novosti and all the Evening Izvestia shows will lovingly lay it before our eyes, and tell us how cute and good and right it all is. I don’t think America will be as filled with admiration as these lunatics expect.

Meanwhile, the forces of sanity (among which I count myself and my loyal reader – Hi, Mom!) will continue to make headway despite the Tranzi Traitors’ (Transnational Progressives) efforts to censor them. They can stifle free speech, suppress the dissemination of ideas and mask their own failures only so far, but it won’t be contained. It can’t be contained, as the USSR found out, and the Chinese Emperor will soon discover.

One approach to unmasking the Lunatic Left is presented in the video below. Would to God it had been done a year ago, it might have made a difference to Johnny Nalbandian’s campaign as opposition research. These guys are not the most scintillating presenters in the world, they are geeks, after all, but their information is sound, relevant and uncomfortable to Mr. Schiff.

Over at PJ Media Richard Fernandez (AKA Wretchard the Cat) has penned another golden essay. It is not my policy to quote other people’s articles in full, but PJ Media’s annoying page refresh sometimes always makes reading their authors painfully frustrating. Therefore I am quoting the full article as it is timely and important, if we are to understand events in the world, be that world foreign or domestic. You can read it with ads and frustrating interruptions there if you can stand it. If PJ Media doesn’t like it they can fix their annoying refresh function.

Col. Austin Bay, who with Jim Dunnigan wrote the classic Quick and Dirty Guide to War, looks at the shape of 21st century conflict in his new book Cocktails From Hell: Five Complex Wars Shaping the 21st Century. Through the prism of five current conflicts, he both explains the actual conflicts and illustrates how the nature of conflict has changed or stayed the same. Bay begins with the most basic question: what is war? Unlikely as it may seem, the answer is not always self-evident. To some, it may appear invisible unless it looks like the familiar Hollywood conventions. Bay’s book begins with the following story, which illustrates the point.

On an evening in February 1990, three months after the Berlin Wall cracked and the Cold War began to melt, I participated in a panel presentation held in a high school auditorium … As I left … a woman intercepted me in the hallway and planted herself directly in front of me … “You write books about war, right? With the end of the Cold War and so many people waging peace, I guess you’ll have to find another subject, eh?” …
I kept my reply civil, sincere, and accurate, “Well, ma’am, it’s quite a hazardous form of peace.”

Of the five conflicts he examines — North Korea’s “frozen” stalemate, Beijing’s expansion in the South China Sea, Russia’s “hybrid” invasion of Ukraine, the proxy and tribal battles in Yemen and the anarchy in the Congo — none resemble the stereotype of conventional war.

The greatest trick modern despots ever pulled was to convince the world that war has ceased to exist by disguising it as other things. In 1999, nine years after Bay’s anecdote and 7 years after Francis Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man appeared, two Chinese air force colonels wrote a paper to contrive just that. It laid out how China could defeat America without a conventional confrontation. Their book, Unrestricted Warfare, proposed an ancient yet largely forgotten strategy to achieve this: by spreading out offensive activity over so many domains no one component would individually cross a red line. Then people like the woman who buttonholed Austin Bay would think nothing was happening until it was too late. The thesis of Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui was neatly summarized by War on the Rocks:

In 1999, two Chinese colonels wrote a book called Unrestricted Warfare, about warfare in the age of globalization. Their main argument: Warfare in the modern world will no longer be primarily a struggle defined by military means — or even involve the military at all….
Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui argued that war was no longer about “using armed forces to compel the enemy to submit to one’s will” in the classic Clausewitzian sense. Rather, they asserted that war had evolved to “using all means, including armed force or non-armed force, military and non-military, and lethal and non-lethal means to compel the enemy to accept one’s interests.” The barrier between soldiers and civilians would fundamentally be erased, because the battle would be everywhere.

The number of new battlefields would be “virtually infinite,” and could include environmental warfare, financial warfare, trade warfare, cultural warfare, and legal warfare, to name just a few. They wrote of assassinating financial speculators to safeguard a nation’s financial security, setting up slush funds to influence opponents’ legislatures and governments, and buying controlling shares of stocks to convert an adversary’s major television and newspapers outlets into tools of media warfare. According to the editor’s note, Qiao argued in a subsequent interview that “the first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden.” That vision clearly transcends any traditional notions of war.

It is the hidden ingredients of the Cocktails from Hell that give them surprising destructive power. With attacks spread over a spectrum of domains, modern war is surprisingly hard to distinguish from other forms of conflict. People brought up on the notion of World War II as “total war” would be astonished to learn how much more ‘total’, yet how much more invisible, war has become. The great strength of Austin Bay’s book is how it illustrates, through the example of actual ongoing conflicts, how cross-domain and cocktail warfare in today’s world actually works.

It works well. Disturbingly well. Just how successful Colonels Quiao and Wang’s stratagems have proved is demonstrated by the fact that — despite breathless media accounts of the Mueller investigation — most of the public has never heard of these new attack domains. One explanation for their invisibility is that their instigators have deliberately contrived to stay out of the Narrative. Cocktails from Hell continues:

The colonels’ sketches of psychological and media warfare overlap with a buzz term that American national security agencies and commentators have begun using: narrative warfare. … Cagey warfighters will dynamically link weaponized narratives to other kinetic and non-kinetic operations in an ongoing conflict and create a powerful operational cocktail. For example, narrative warfare linked to a false flag operation may shape or alter an election. Criminal speculators could use the same combination to destroy an honest company’s reputation, sell the company’s stock short, then spread the “big lie” to drive the stock price down. The weaponized narrative’s combination of speed and pervasiveness can create psychological vulnerabilities in an adversary’s population. In a long war or extended diplomatic confrontation, fear and doubt seeded by an adversary’s weaponized narratives may erode its opponent’s will to continue to struggle.

“Well, ma’am, it’s quite a hazardous form of peace,” as Col. Bay said. Today, as we nostalgically look back on the seemingly secure old global world, it’s worthwhile wondering if perhaps that was the attack vector.

What the Chinese are doing is really nothing new, the dreaded Russians were doing it 100 years ago. Any and every means were deployed to tear down non-Soviet states and weld them into the Evil Empire of which Ronald Reagan spoke and subsequently destroyed. We see the same thing in the Soviets’ spiritual descendants, the Progressives and the Democratic Party. In their mad pursuit of power they corrupt everything they touch and make it anti-human in order to control it.

Except, of course, after a while it gets hard for real humans to swallow, they you get the yellow vests in France and elsewhere. The yellow vest movement, it should be noted, is NOT under control and is spreading. Who knows, someday we may even get some yellow vest dust ups here.

Yet even that isn’t enough. As John C. Wright observes, “So, no matter what tactics can and must be used to fight this darkness in high places, the first step in the crusade is to kneel. Only by dedication to Christ have we the power to trample these scorpions and serpents unhurt.”

I can’t validate the source, but certain elements line up with what is known. Is this made up by Hillary Clinton, Tom Clancy or Dean Koontz? As you read you will want to know that a Davy Crockett is a nuclear mortar.

Bad enough that some of this is believable, worse if any is true, terrifying if even half of it is true. May God have mercy on us all.

While granting that there are far too many Donks in the Senate and RYANOS in the House, that’s about the long and the short of it. Unless Trump can get the wall funded and the building of it started he, and his agenda going forward, is toast. So is the Republic, which is pretty well burned already anyway. The Donks are doubly incentivised to refuse to fund the wall, first to keep the borders open to continue the process of electorate replacement, and second to torpedo Trump’s, and by extension Patriotic Republicans’ chances of victory in 2020.

Now granted Trump has delivered massively on some of his promises, notably trade agreements, deregulation and, the big one so far, sane, Constitutional originalist judges. (I, for one, am looking forward to the fireworks when Ruthie, who’s got one foot and four and nine tenths toes in the grave, kicks the bucket.) But he has notably failed on others: medical monopolies reform (who remembers that?), drain the swamp and build the big, beautiful wall. These promises he must, MUST, *MUST* keep else all is lost.

Yes, Obamacare has foundered and sunk, no thanks to the GOP, finally being sent to the bottom by a Texas judge with a spine. Of course the Commiecrats will challenge that in court, because it ain’t really settled law until they get their way, but for now its dead and good riddance. But medicare is an open artery that unless promptly staunched will bleed the country white in very short order. Along with that the price fixing between hospitals and insurance companies must be stopped. Here’s an experiment for you: when next you have cause to enter a hospital ask for a breakdown of costs BEFORE you sign on the dotted line, as is required by law. Of course you won’t, because by then you’re between the devil and the deep blue sea and they’ll just let you choose another caregiver. Good luck with that. Nor will they give you a breakdown of actual costs incurred when presenting you with the bill.

Click to enlarge

There have been over 50,000 secret indictments filed all over the country in the last two years (before this the annual average was about 1,000/year). That there is a secret cabal plotting the overthrow of our Constitution can no longer be doubted. Unless they are exposed and brought to swift and public justice they will remain in place to continue their dastardly work of undermining our freedom, our Constitution and our republican form of government. This is concerning not just on its face, but because historically when republics fall they are replaced by dictatorships. If the Trump Administration doesn’t act on this soon his credibility will be eviscerated and his agenda will be undone.

Just because the vaunted ‘Caravan’ has seemingly fizzled doesn’t mean that we’ve won the battle of the border. ‘Seemingly’ because as of a couple of weeks ago the leaders of the Leftist organized “spontaneous march” showed up at the American Consulate in Tijuana and demanded that they be either admitted to the US or be given $50,000 each to go home. To the best of my knowledge they are still holding their breath on that one. Now that the GOP has, at the 59th minute of the 11th hour, budgeted a measly 5 billion for wall construction the Demoncrats are losing their minds.

Trump put one over on Nancy ‘Nutjob’ Pelosi and Chuck ‘the Schmuck’ Schumer by leaving the press in the room when they met with the President and the Vice President in the Oval Office. That was nice, but nicer is the government shut down showdown. I notice that in contrast to Barrack ‘the Hack’ Obama’s government shutdown, recall how he used government employees to try and prevent public access to Federal property, Trump has gone out of his way to insure that the public can still access Federal facilities.

So far so good, for certain values of ‘good’, but he needs to win this. He’s gotten off to a good start, as seen in the video below. Trump ambushed them by making the discussion public, notice how Pelosi objects and Trump responds. Notice how Schumer tries to control the discussion, but Trump rolls right over him. To win he must hold firm on that crappy 5 billion and humiliate the Democrats. That will be Christmas gift worth having.

Chuck ‘the Schmuck’ smirking for the cameras while turning his back on the President.

Voting.

REIMAGINED.

An innovative voter-centered approach to voting for Los Angeles County

The Voting Solutions for All People (VSAP) was developed by the Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk (RR/CC) in 2009 to address an aging voting system and an increasingly large and complex electorate. The project seeks a collaborative approach to voting system design that will put voters at the center and maximize stakeholder participation.Through field research and coalition building, the RR/CC has pioneered a voter-centered approach to voting system design and development.

There is a short video at the bottom of the page which I cannot copy here but which is important to view. Go there and watch it.

Pardon my cynicism, but can anything coming out of any Democrat controlled institution be good for the country?

Huh. I thought not. We better be in on it or we lose out again.

The problem with electronic voter systems is that they are unaccountable. The whole shooting works can be run from one central location and the results changed to suit the system administrators with the click of a mouse. Click! Candidate A receives the majority of votes and Candidate B the lesser amount, regardless of the actual tallies. If the Administrator likes the result he keeps it, if not he flips it.

The proposal has several advantages for a one party state. New voting machines and their subsystems are an excellent opportunity for graft. This will cost millions and the taxpayers will fund it. But it will eliminate the effort and expense of stockpiling pre-packed voting boxes in random closets and car trunks, and it won’t be necessary to pay operatives to go vote harvesting.

The meeting to be held in the Republican’s back yard is going to take place as follows: